DayZ Early Access impressions: Surviving in the land of glitches

In most games, this would be the crappy weapon. In DayZ, you'll be happy you have a weapon at all.

For a certain brand of video game fan, aggravation is actually a feature. From the precise-jump insanity of Super Meat Boy to the convoluted controls of the Jane's flight simulator franchise, the most frustrating gameplay can often attract the most devoted followers. These are the games that actively discourage casual lookie-loos and leave only those willing to stomach repeated failures and detailed, game-specific wikis.

Maybe that's why people love DayZ so much (no relation to Jay-Z, in case you were wondering). This Czech-developed "survival" simulator launched in 2012 as a mod for the already-complicated military game ArmA 2. That release quickly racked up fans thanks to its giant open world and a surprisingly unique take on PvP that made the game's ferocious zombies much less terrifying than other online players, who will kill and rob you to procure anything from guns to life-sustaining bottles of water.

Even in its early state, DayZ's ability to wring the most evil instincts from fellow players proved impressive. So fans understandably flipped out last month when DayZ finally evolved from mod status to a standalone game, being sold as an alpha version on Steam through the service's "Early Access" feature. That means it's ready for prime time, right? Ha! Hardly!

To be fair, the developers know this is the case. If phrases like "Early Access" and "Alpha" weren't clear enough for potential buyers, DayZ's Steam page warns: "PLEASE DO NOT PURCHASE IT UNLESS YOU... ARE PREPARED TO HANDLE SERIOUS ISSUES AND POSSIBLE INTERRUPTIONS OF GAME FUNCTIONING." Even if you leapfrog over that proclamation and cough up $30, you're given another impossible-to-ignore warning message reminding you of the game's "early alpha" disarray when you first load it up.

If that's all it takes to rack up over a million sales in the first month, I should quit this game reviewing gig and launch my buggy napping simulator. I'll call it LayZ.

Until then, I've spent some time with the incomplete game since its late-December launch, either slogging through its buggy worlds or watching others do the same by way of Let's Play videos. The game may still be broken, but for the target audience of survival-crazed sociopaths, that fact has only made it more tantalizing.

Finding your way

When I first loaded the game, I spawned on a beach. Well, I think I did. I heard some roaring of ocean water, but I couldn't see a danged thing other than incredibly dark mountains in the distance. It turns out that I had spawned on a server stuck in nighttime. Servers run on a real-time, 24-hour clock, so this server wouldn't see the sun for a while.

I flipped through some menus, and in spite of the most convoluted keyboard configuration screen I've seen in years, I began making sense of some buttons, including the highly important inventory toggle. That's how I found I had a flashlight, which seemed potentially useful. Ten minutes of struggling later, I still hadn't figured out how to turn the thing on. I was continuing to struggle when a prowling zombie managed to find my brains through the darkness and eat them.

I alt-tabbed to beg for help from Google, only to find this helpful tip on a DayZ wiki: "Using the flashlight in the DayZ standalone alpha is kind of tricky." Cold comfort for my fresh corpse.

Much like the original DayZ mod, most of the game's systems and maneuvers require a good bit of trial and error. Much like Minecraft, you spawn in a giant world with no instructions and a small inventory. You pretty quickly learn that thirst and hunger are your greatest threats in DayZ. It doesn't take long to find food, drink, and other necessities scattered around a mostly abandoned expanse of Eastern European towns and forests—an apple in this cabin, a can of soda in that office.

Once you stumble upon some of the more lucrative loot—giant backpacks, shirts with pockets, axes, machine guns—you realize how much surviving you just might pull off. The fact that the first zombies you come across will probably be pretty buggy both helps and hurts this growing sense of safety. Most of the zombies I've met have gotten themselves stuck in the ground, with only their torsos sticking out. Others seem like they can't forget the player's location or respect the state of a closed door. There's nothing like thinking you've shut a zombie out only to watch it warp through solid wood and eat your face.

Humans are way worse. Every session saves your character's state and inventory. When you log back in, you'll typically respawn on a new server with newly restocked locales. You can theoretically server-hop your way to quite the arsenal and raise hell for newer players in the process. It's a waste to pick on fresh spawns, who rarely have any food or ammo worth stealing. Still, that hasn't stopped jerks from camping in the game world's few giant towns and picking off peons (or, in a video that topped reddit this week, playing a particularly sociopathic god).

Finding your friends (and enemies)

Enlarge/ Good luck finding the people you're playing with in the miles of open space without a working map.

In my first session with a friend (an admitted DayZ addict himself), I started listing various geographic details that I had just seen in an attempt to triangulate my position. The game world doesn't have much in the way of astounding, specific locales; I noticed a shore to my left, a giant hill to my right, a zombie-overrun town behind me, and a bridge ahead. My friend told me to run ahead and he'd meet me soon.

Somehow, he knew exactly where I was (like I said, he's a DayZ addict). It still took us one-and-a-half hours of running through the environment to find each other. Even that was a pretty lucky coincidence considering how huge DayZ's map is.

The mod version included a wide variety of vehicles, none of which are yet in the standalone alpha version (my kingdom for a bicycle!). The game's promised feature list includes the return of vehicles, along with wildlife to hunt and more crafting options. It's easy to get caught up in wishes while suffering through the game's early alpha build: if only I had this weapon; if only I could punch and eat a deer in this giant forest; if I only I could ride a vehicle out of this section instead of marching for 20 minutes; if only the map I found in a cabin would actually load so that I know where the heck I am without having to load an online map full of Cyrillic script.

There's also the matter of the game often killing you for no good reason. For example, you are very likely to fall by way of a glitch when you try to scale a ladder. Adding insult to that injury, you need to scale ladders to find the game's best loot on rooftops, particularly the morphine injections that relieve the pain of... falling down from ladders.

And yet when the game employs some common sense, it absolutely lights up. You just started bleeding? Right-click a shirt to tear it apart and create rags, and then you can tie your wounds to stay alive. Find a can of tuna but don't have a can opener? You can absolutely use an axe to open that sucker up; it'll cost you a percentage of the food inside, but it's better than nothing when you're starving.

There's also the matter of the game opening up once you accumulate friends and loot. You may burn through nearly a dozen hour-plus sessions and die empty-handed before things finally go your way. There's a certain flow to the play sometimes, like when you find a backpack, then some grub, then a conveniently placed water fountain, then a weak shovel, then some first-aid gear, then a more powerful axe, and then guns and ammo, all in precisely the order you need them. Maybe sometimes, all of a sudden, strangers start to play nice—"Let's team up and get through this mess together, brother!"—and you can pick through towns more quickly. That way your hunger and thirst take longer to return.

That's when team-survival tactics come into play, and showdowns against groups of online foes can result in the biggest supply pickups possible (or soul-crushing disappointments by way of ambush and defeat). That's DayZ's secret sauce: the stronger you get, the weaker you feel. And while gun control and netcode aren't 100 percent, they tend not to get in the way of these kinds of thrilling showdowns.

(Just so you know, however, no matter how well things are going, your teammate[s] will absolutely kill you at some point. Kill them first. Humans are the worst.)

Certainly, the alpha is accomplishing its stated mission of getting tons of people—usually devoted fans—a chance to help make sure the game is tuned perfectly at a base level. The less devoted are going to find more frustration than joy in troubleshooting these bugs; for example, certain types of ammo are dropping for guns that don't yet exist, and it doesn't sound like the arsenal will grow anytime soon.

Right now, buying DayZ means becoming a mouse in a maze; your purpose is more to help the developers figure out where best to place the cheese than to consistently find, and enjoy, a nice chunk of your own veritable gameplay Gouda. The good news is that even in this largely broken state, the game already feels like it's on pace to create the ultimate playland for diehard PvP villainy. Upon the game's final release in 2015, that kind of human betrayal will ultimately prove more frustrating and agonizing than any all-caps "SERIOUS ISSUES" in the alpha's warnings.

I played the mod quite a bit, but my favorite DayZ moment so far was about 2 hours into my first Standalone session. I was exploring for loot on a nightime server with just a flashlight, a baseball bat and a rotten kiwi to show for my time. Just as I was coming out of a house, three guys rolled up on me, screaming for me to raise my hands. I just kept shouting "all I have is a bat!!" over and over. As soon as I got my hands up, everybody started shooting... everybody. I got clipped, shit my pants and ran around the corner to tear up my tshirt to bandage. When I came back out of hiding, there were three dead, fully-kitted bodies. Jackpot!